


Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing

by sshysmm



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Depression, F/M, Gen, Murder-Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 06:53:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4994521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Filling in the gaps between the end of season 1 and the revelation of what happened to Emily Reid (recounted in 2.02). No one's intentions are quite without selfishness, but no one intends things to end as they do. A meander through Edmund, Emily and Deborah's emotional states as the hope of finding Mathilda comes and goes and Emily struggles to return to her normal life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The silence of the Reid family home was a deep, stale silence, although over the years it had changed its character. From the ringing shock of contrast — no more bursts of laughter, no more child’s prattling, no more twinkling music box — to a heavy, oppressive expectancy, it had recently undergone a new shift. At least, Edmund Reid thought it had happened recently; it may have been a gradual change that he was only now awakening to. Now the silence of the home draped itself over all, smothering, shrouding its two inhabitants like sheets on furniture in a disused room.

Emily stood from the dinner table, gathered the plates and left the room. The first meal shared at home in months and neither had had a word to say to the other.

Edmund fixed his eyes on the table cloth, old photos taunting him from the mantelpiece. Emily laughing on his arm; a smile he didn’t even recognise on his own bemused face; windswept and in love on the seafront. He remembered how much she used to talk, her words breathless with hope and passionate with assertions of the justice and compassion that the world needed to feel. That she had believed he provided in his work. He had relished interrupting the flow of her words, kissing them quiet, telling her there would be time for justice later, time to solve the world’s problems later. Her laughter had bubbled on, tingling across both their lips.

She had almost talked like that again when she sought patronage for her women’s shelter. Now the idea of quietening her when she spoke filled him with guilt and despair. If she were to load the air with her words again he would have listened for an eternity, gazing on her with rapturous devotion.

He looked up at the doorway, where she stood uneasily, a little of his thoughts still visible on his face. Emily swallowed and her eyes danced away from his. She sent the silence scattering with thickly voiced speech: “the bedroom is not quite cleared. I will go to finish that now.”

They say that the best defence is a good offence. Edmund flinched at the reminder of her desire to have their daughter’s old room cleared. He watched her checked dress disappear down the corridor as though it were a portcullis reeling shut.

He could not yield to her need to forget and she could not yield to his need to remember. The similarities that had brought them so close together now only pushed them further apart, where the stubbornness of inertia fought doggedly against the stubbornness of momentum. He felt like some ancient woodland uprooted: unbalanced, rent apart by the wildly desperate woman who tried to pull away from him.

Once, it seemed, she had tried to pull him along with her, but he sensed this was no longer the case.

He could not stay and listen to the muffled sounds of activity in Mathilda’s room, imagining beloved items shorn of their context and crammed into a chest. He moved to the bottom of the stairs, called quietly: “Emily.”

The silence returned.

“Emily, I am going back to the station.”

No response.

Excuses to leave seemed pointless: she had heard them all before and knew that paperwork, interrogation, filing, even the whisky in his office cabinet, all of them came before the awkwardness of being at home. Especially when Mathilda’s absence proclaimed itself as loud as it had since Emily demanded that the room be cleared.

Sounds of packing began to drift downstairs again and Edmund turned wearily to the coat-hooks, retrieving his hat and outdoor jacket. Dimly he thought that he should have offered to help, that perhaps if they had tackled the room together it might have prompted a fraction of the conversation they should have had over the past year. But he had admitted his guilt too recently — and not to Emily. He had reopened that wound and been rewarded for it with a soft face and a warm hand squeezing his own, with no blame and no judgement, with easy sympathy and eyes that reflected only the sadness in his voice. Emily’s response, were he to tell her, would not be able to offer such comfort. The betrayal was too personal, their experience of its effects too thoroughly entrenched for emotions as simple as sympathy and sadness. Feeling a coward, but feeling oddly free, Edmund strode away from the house and into the cool, foggy April night.

\---

The station was still stunned in the wake of Hobbs’ murder, but to Edmund its quietude remained peaceful. It never attained the depths of the silence at home: an inmate shuffling in his cell or coughing; the syrupy splash of coffee poured by the night deskman; the murmured conversations of constables coming and going; these were all reminders that human company was at hand. Life went on in the station in a way it could not between him and Emily.

He nodded at the deskman and went into his office, sinking into the familiar chair and surveying the items on his desk. Case files to be reviewed, the growing puzzle of the deaths at Argentine Marine, but it was the notes he had drafted for Constable Hobbs’ memorial that he now settled on. He would finish composing his thoughts — just enough for the duty of it, to remind the men that Hobbs’ death would not be in vain, and then Artherton would take over. Artherton had the right disposition for managing the mourning of an entire division: he knew the appropriate songs, easily grasped the necessary balance between righteous indignation and open grief.

When Edmund had finished this task and checked through the completed case files to be put away, the station had lulled further into the calm of the early morning hours. He considered whether or not to see if Jackson were awake, toying with opening the drawer in which he kept a decanter and the crystal glasses Abberline had given him for a wedding present. He strove to listen for sounds from the cells, crept quietly from his office and shuffled between the caged rooms, but the only sounds that greeted him were snoring and the rustle of straw mattresses under restless sleepers. Jackson was curled beneath his woollen blanket, facing away from the corridor and breathing deeply.

Edmund was confident that Hobbs’ murder would be solved and even that Jackson would be released, cleared of charges in no time. Why, then, the sudden sense of vertigo as he looked on his friend in the cell? The sense that the ground under his feet was shifting, that the earth suddenly turned a little too fast. He was a rational man, and did not believe for a moment that such things could actually be, but something seemed to be changing in his life. Too much was changing.

Emily was out of mourning: for her Mathilda’s life and death were wrapped up, completed, a thing of the past to be done away with. He was unmoored by this, unable to confess to the reasons he was so certain Mathilda yet lived. Jackson’s own past was catching up with him, as it was always going to, recalling the medical professional to a gunslinging form that Edmund could not accommodate in the police station. Hobbs, so promising a young investigator, had left a hole in the heart of H Division that would not quickly be filled. And Edmund found his thoughts now continually distracted by a presence wholly beyond the sadness of home and the therapy of work, one change that sent waves of relief flooding through him whenever he thought of it.

It was a couple of hours before dawn and he could not face his office or his home. Casting a resentful glance at the camp bed beside his desk that had never failed him until now, he retrieved his coat and hat and stepped out into the cloying night air. He told himself that he walked nowhere in particular, but his feet guided him on familiar paths, speeding him along on a cushion of unfocussed hope and longing. The sky was struggling to lighten as he caught sight of the squat red brick building, isolated amongst the rubble around it, somehow shouldering its way free of the dank mist that clung to the ground. He sighed as if surprised that this was where he had arrived, paused in the clear area that constituted a playground in front of the building.

Inside that building there was a warmth and a love that he craved desperately. The unbalance that he had felt in the station was made worse where he stood, leaning on the children’s maying pole, gazing up at a window, trying to pierce the drawn curtains with his need, hoping that she inside would sense something, wake, and see him there. And then…he did not know.

The other day, the last he had been inside the building, he remembered the moment when something within him had opened — just a crack at first — when Deborah Goren’s cool fingers had pried at his collar, seen but a fraction of the scars he bore, and her anger had melted in pity, faster than the remnants of snow in warm spring rain.

When Emily looked at him with pity he felt only self-loathing, resentment of the piety behind her pity, disgust that she prayed for the peace of the man who had failed their daughter. Emily’s pity was contaminated by the knowledge that she put him beyond guilt because he could not tell her of his guilt. Since the events of the accident had been dredged from the depths once more he could barely look at his wife for the fear that what sympathy she still bore him was wholly reliant upon his lack of fault in the matter. She had convinced herself of this so thoroughly, or so it seemed to him, that he felt a fraud in his own home.

But like a rusty hinge, once wrenched open, Edmund could not close himself again easily. Deborah had listened to him, had heard the full story, knew his fault, knew why he could not say these things to Emily now. He recognised dimly that what he sought from Deborah he should have cultivated at home, should have talked to Emily like they had once talked together, sharing every doubt, every concern.

However, a man cannot speak of his guilt to a woman in black who has prayed for his recovery for weeks. Without the details, which are too raw to give, his declamations of self-fault fall on deaf ears, ears that ring only with relief that one of the two has returned safely. And then he stops trying to claim fault, because she cannot hear it; she wants to be joyful of his return, to mourn together what he cannot mourn because he cannot say it is gone. And he is confronted by his knowledge of his fault every time he comes home, he cannot speak of it, so he cherishes it as something to be absolved through work. He works and works, afraid of solving this case but intent on doing so because if he does not then what has it all been for?

The guilt is locked in a precious shrine at the centre of who he is, its veneration and appeasement the reason behind all he does.

Deborah saw this shrine, and she did not flinch away. She listened sadly, sharing her sympathy freely, with no attachments: sympathy for Mathilda, sympathy for Emily, sympathy for him and the situation he has found himself in. Edmund Reid had not been so grateful to another for a very long time. The freedom to talk, to be listened to, to be honest with someone, utterly and fully honest, was like a drug. He thought to himself of the pioneering ‘talking therapy’ that Parisian journals reported on, and he found rationality in the fact that he stood at an orphanage window in the dawn hours, longing to share everything with a woman to whom he was not married.

But he had delayed too long this night, and with a shudder he pushed himself off from the pole he leant on, stealing a final glance up at the window. The anaemic morning sunlight reflected brightly from the glass and concealed the folds of the curtains behind it. Edmund did not see Deborah Goren gaze down on his retreating form and close the curtains again hurriedly, drawing deep breaths of gratified confusion.

\---

In Kyiv she had sung and drunk and argued with men who thought of themselves as Bohemians and anarchists. She had held her own with playwrights and painters in smoke-filled bars and halls, jostling with her cousins Joshua and Isaac for a hearing in these male-dominated spheres. But here the compassion that had ruled her arguments found a new outlet in her role as caretaker of orphans. Some of her first orphans had journeyed with her family as they fled the pogroms, and her insistence that the community elders in Whitechapel did right by these newcomers had won her the support and respect of the sprawling Jewish community in these streets. Deborah Goren did not view her current life as a contradiction of her former one, it had merely supplied a purpose for the youthful idealism and unfocussed malcontent she had voiced with others of her generation.

When she had lashed out at the impassive form of Inspector Reid, she had acted without a second thought. The last time she had flown at a lawman in a rage she had received a swift elbow to the face and a bruising knee to the stomach, had clawed at the man’s suit as she tumbled to her knees, dragging gold buttons from his jacket with her nails. She thought of those buttons in the red-stained mud of her home streets, and she hoped that both they and the man who wore them rotted.

The disappointment that she had felt in Reid was different simply because her hopes and expectations had been raised. And it was not to be satisfied by the way he retreated under her blows, a man twice her size, fleeing from her open-palmed shoves. When he had first cried out under the assault it had inflamed her anger, the sound a petty recompense for the loss of her cousin Joshua. But the hand that finally caught hers was firm and she had reeled as far away as the grip would allow, suddenly cautious of what she had begun.

Her thoughts often returned to the gesture he had made next: a palm laid protectively over his chest, right over his heart. A gesture of respect or affection in different circumstances, but here made vulnerable, not for the benefit of others but for himself, as if he were trying to hold something in that struggled to be released.

She remembered the smoothness of the skin at his collarbone, contrasting with the puckered contours it had adopted. Deborah thought of this as she revived the little fire in her room in the morning, watching old newspaper twist and crumple as it took to flame, thinking in horror of Joseph’s burnt body and of Edmund, pinned under molten metal, all around him noise and heat as the world slipped out of his control.

The fire crackled merrily into life, quickly dispatching the damp chill from the gloomy little room. She stood and clutched her shawl closer despite the building warmth, returning to the window to peer down into the square again. She wondered how long he had been standing there and berated herself for the shiver of excitement she felt at the thought of him waiting below, looking up at her darkened window. Why had he not made himself known?

Deborah thought of the kiss they had shared, raising her fingers to her lips unconsciously, disappointed at their coldness in contrast to his warm mouth. She had pragmatically put thoughts of him aside since he had mentioned his wife, observing the care in his face with as much detachment as she could muster. If she convinced herself that he was simply a friend and an ally then it would be so. But what he had told her, how he had reacted when she suggested that the hope of Mathilda’s survival was frail … she saw a door to his marriage flung open through which it was not her place to see. Behind the door was coldness and misunderstanding, lives grown apart through a tragedy he blamed himself for.

Self-pity may not have been an attractive quality, but Deborah knew a thing or two about sadness and regret, and her heart had opened to the sadness of the Reids’ past. She could do nothing for Mathilda, nor Emily, who would do nothing but pray for Edmund anymore. Thinking of all the prayers she had made unanswered, all the futility of asking a god to fix the problems of men, when problems were only caused by those men not talking directly to one another, Deborah could only wish that he had knocked on her door that night.

\---

The next night he did not hesitate. Letting Artherton take over with his nasally singing voice, Edmund beat a hasty exit from the station, arriving at the orphanage as its mistress tucked up the last of her charges and closed the door on their sleeping forms.

Deborah appeared at the entrance with surprising speed, as though she had been expecting him. Edmund did not know what to say to her and stood dumb on the threshold, thoughts of talking to a sympathetic listener warring with the lust that washed over him at the sight of her. She asked nothing of him, but extended a hand carefully, as though coaxing a stray animal into her trust. Before her fingers reached his cheek he inclined his head gratefully towards her touch, the coolness of her skin soothing his warm face. With resolve she ushered him inside and shut the door.

Perhaps he could not quite admit to one of the reasons he stood in her corridor, but Deborah’s barely supressed smirk of excitement acknowledged that reason. Was she reliving the naïveté of her twenties, thinking that she stood equal with the men of the Kyivan bars because she offered to comfort and fix them, poor broken artists whose psyches needed soothing? Her movements were more cautious now than they had been then, and the man who followed her to her bedroom was no doughy wannabe darling of Yiddish theatre; here was a man whose pain was no affectation for the sake of his art. She must know that what they shared was not to fix anything, was just a temporary relief, and would be followed by a guilt she had never had to face with the youthful Bohemians whenever she encountered his wife. But she moved close to him to push the bedroom door shut, held the candle up between them and looked at his blue eyes glitter in its unsteady light. Selfishness could coexist with compassion, there was no dishonesty between them, and Deborah had honestly, selfishly entertained thoughts of it since he had strode into her orphanage asking clipped questions about a missing girl.

She put the candle down and they sprang together like a trap shutting, his hands scattering the pins from her hair across the floor, plunging into her curls whilst she fumbled his cravat and its pin loose. Edmund Reid went a second night without sleep, but as he dressed the next morning he felt more at peace than he had in many months.

\---

Where his rest grew, Deborah was surprised to find her unease come more quickly. Emily Reid was a good, kind woman, and hearing of Deborah’s work at the orphanage, she had resolved to enlist her help with the shelter. Deborah could not but want to share her experience, offer tips for saving funds, cooking for many mouths, dividing the chores of running such a large household. And when she did, she felt she contributed joy and relief to Mrs Reid as she also did to Edmund, but when the married pair were together in her presence she found the façade stifling. Emily Reid was so kind, so generous, how could she hear the truth of events on the steamer, as Edmund had shared them with Deborah, and not respond with forgiveness, not wish to repair their tattered relationship?

A newcomer to Mrs Reid’s shelter was a woman from the Jewish community, and Deborah knew that the judgement-free environment that Mrs Reid provided would not meet with the approval of the community elders. Once Edmund had left and she had arranged the orphans under the authority of the eldest, she took some of her personal savings and gathered items from the market for the woman, homely goods produced by other immigrants who recreated the stalls of their homelands here in Whitechapel. Mrs Reid herself let Deborah in, smiling warmly at the sight of the basket she carried. “Miss Goren! This is really beyond your duties. How kind you are.”

Deborah smiled in return and bobbed a curtsey. She took the goods to the woman, who had little desire to talk to anyone, her eyes wide and mistrusting. Afterwards, Mrs Reid invited Deborah to take tea with her and the two of them sat in a light, airy room on the first floor.

“How are your little ones?”

Deborah glanced down. There was not a hint of resentment in Mrs Reid’s voice. “They are well, thank you Mrs Reid. They all grow quickly and most flourish with it.”

“Some will be ready to move on soon, I hear?”

“Yes,” Deborah stirred her tea distractedly. “Though I must be sure they are ready. I do not want others to be taken by the streets as Thomas was.”

Mrs Reid’s bright, sharp eyes darkened under a frown of recognition. “Thomas is the boy my husband helped you free from that cruel gang?”

“He is,” Deborah hoped her face did not colour. She hated how easy it was to talk to this woman as though she had not spent all last night in the company of her husband. “Thomas needs more care than ever now. Even a short period of neglect can damage a person beyond easy repair. I am not sure he will ever truly outgrow the experience.”

Mrs Reid was silent for a moment; only the bustle of the street outside filled the lull in conversation. “I used to think that no person was beyond repair, Miss Goren,” she said quietly, gazing out of the window. “I hope that this shelter’s work can restore my former belief.”

Deborah sipped at her tea, casting about for appropriate words. “These women are so very lucky to have you and your help, Mrs Reid.”

The sound of Mrs Reid’s cup being placed firmly on its saucer made Deborah look up directly. The other woman’s face, still full of the kindness that made Deborah’s heart ache with guilt whenever she looked at Mrs Reid, was now also lined with the grief that she recognised all too well from Edmund’s features. “Has…” she began, swallowing once as her eyes grew moist. “Has my husband mentioned our daughter? Asked you to keep a place for…” she shook her head, pressing her lips together. “Does he believe, really _believe_ still, that she lives?”

Deborah felt her mouth drop open a bit, stunned by the suddenness of the question. She put her own cup down hastily and grasped Mrs Reid’s arm with a firm, reassuring grip. “Mrs Reid!” The other woman continued to shake her head, more at herself than in response to Deborah’s touch. She fumbled a handkerchief from a pocket in her dress, pressing it to her damp cheeks. “I cannot answer that,” Deborah told her, but the words sounded limp, pathetic in her own ears. What was she protecting by not telling Mrs Reid the truth of the matter?

Meanwhile, the other woman began to nod instead, trying to acknowledge that this was the response she expected, but guilt stabbed at Deborah. She shuffled her chair closer to Mrs Reid so that she could take the sobbing woman’s hand in both of hers. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, he asked. Some time ago. When investigating Thomas. He asked me if I would ever take in a young girl with no…” she hesitated, but Mrs Reid’s eyes begged her to finish. “A young girl with no memory of family.”

Once more Mrs Reid shook her head, but there was vehemence in it now. She bit her bottom lip. “He will not let her be, Miss Goren! She cannot have peace from her own father.”

Deborah kept her eyes fixed on their hands, her thumb mechanically stroking the skin on the back of Mrs Reid’s knuckles as she would try to soothe an inconsolable child.

“Do you know the poet, Coleridge, Miss Goren?” Mrs Reid’s voice grew firmer again, though it was still thick with emotion.

Deborah frowned, looked up at Mrs Reid and nodded. “Yes, I know him. The Ancient Mariner.”

“Exactly!” The conviction in the other’s voice was now startling, as the wave of grief that had come over her so quickly ebbed. “He bears our daughter as though she were an albatross, Miss Goren.” Something furious and a bit wild was in her eyes, and she now gripped Deborah’s hand back a little too tightly. “I know he blames himself. I know it. I know there is something he does not tell me, because how can a wife not see the redacted parts of her husband’s speech? But if he has truly evidence that she yet lives then why does he not share it? I cannot think it is anything but false hope that he cherishes, or he would tell me what else happened that day.”

Unable to break apart from the intensity of Mrs Reid’s expression, Deborah flinched. “I cannot imagine it, Mrs Reid. I cannot imagine what this loss does to a person.” It was something of a lie; Deborah thought often of those she had lost in the riots and persecution that drove her from her homeland. But she did not think she could bear much more of the weight of the disintegrating marriage whose affairs she had stumbled into. The history of two people; their combined history: it threatened to drag her into a quagmire of regret and reproachfulness.

She felt her shoulders loosen as Mrs Reid looked away, relaxing her grip on Deborah’s hands. “I keep hoping he will come back one day, Miss Goren. My husband never really returned from the accident, although he promises he will return when he has found her once more. How long must I wait for him?” A strange calm had now come over her, as speedily as her tears had arisen. She smiled wanly at Deborah, released her hand and smoothed her dress down. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “I have nobody to confide in these days, but I cannot keep the silence that works so well for others.”

Deborah pursed her lips, smiled back with sadness. She thought of the outpouring of words, the first of the day, as Edmund had nestled under her arm, his morning stubble scratching the skin of her breast as he had talked.

The two women stood. Mrs Reid smiled again, it was as full of warmth and kindness as the one she had greeted Deborah with when she arrived earlier. “Thank you, Miss Goren. I hope we will see each other again soon.” She reached out and gave Deborah’s arm a friendly squeeze.

“Yes,” Deborah agreed, gently touching the hand on her arm. “Take care, Mrs Reid.”

\---

Emily could not regret putting the softly spoken Miss Goren in an uncomfortable situation over their tea. Miss Goren was a woman always eager to help, and Emily had come to know well when it was better for her to seek the sympathetic ear of another than to bottle up her grief and frustrations. The conversation had a cleansing effect on her emotions, and it was with renewed peace and restfulness that she returned to the work of running the shelter. Her complexion adapted as quickly as her cares and no one who saw her rosy cheek and clear eye would have thought her a woman who had so recently cried in bitterness over what could not be fixed.

When she came to the door of the newly admitted Miss Erskine — who had been absent from breakfast — she now found her missing and the room cleared of all belongings. Emily did not hesitate to leave for the station. Edmund her husband may have been reliably absent from all that she wished he were still a part of, but Edmund the inspector was always there when he was needed.

Although his office door was open, she imagined she felt a cold puff of air as a barrier slammed shut between them once he caught sight of her. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes briefly and made herself ignore the stony expression he bore. Aiming for a lightness in her voice despite the seriousness of what she came to report, she still paused when she noticed the camp-bed by the desk. She had lain there in the agony of poison only a few weeks back and he had begged her to live for him. But now he assumed her glance was one of reproach for not having returned to sleep in his own bed last night. “I am tired, Emily. I would sleep on pins,” he said with a measure of defensiveness.

Again, Emily let the tone wash over her, forcing a smile. The circles under his eyes looked less deep than they had of late though. She pressed on breezily, putting her concerns about Rose Erskine to him and he vowed to come by later to assess the room.

Walking alone back to the shelter, she thought again of the camp-bed. Of his warm hands enveloping hers, the gratitude and relief in his eyes when she had weakly smiled; the beginning of recovery from her illness. She had looked on him in just such a way after the accident on the steamer, sending desperate prayers for at least half of her family to be returned to her. She smiled ruefully to herself. Neither would let the other go, but neither knew what to do once their requests had been granted, when they were alone together once more. The space between them was the shape of Mathilda, and nothing, not one other thing could fill that void. She would have accepted it, tried to reach out to him across the space, over the loss and the absence. But he embraced the void itself, and had little inclination to reach beyond it to her.

He and Sergeant Drake arrived at the shelter a little later. She caught the smell of the tavern on both of them: ale on Drake and whisky on her husband. As always, she acted as though she had not noticed. In public she acted as much as possible as though this man was the same one she had married, this being her one concession to his need to live in the past. Attentive to his every request, she busied herself fetching paper and a pencil when called to do so, supplied answers to all questions on Miss Erskine, exchanged friendly smiles with Drake, who shuffled awkwardly under her gaze. She supposed it was guilt at the suspicion that she could smell the beer on him.

Briefly she had felt that things were like they had been before Mathilda came along. She would be a sounding board for her husband’s most difficult cases, pacing behind his desk whilst he sat, half-turned in his chair, listing the knowns and the unknowns. But it was like the backdrop on a stage, and as he left with barely a nod she sensed the illusion come tumbling down around her. Sorrowfully, Emily returned to her work.

\---

Edmund grew bolder this second night, letting himself in through the front door, standing by as Deborah went round the bunk room with words of kindness for each small form. Pouring a little of her boundless love and gentleness out for every child. Edmund waited his turn.

For now, for once, he let the work take a backseat. Now he wanted only the relief that her touch brought: warm, almost too cloying in the small room with its well-maintained fireplace.

Deborah allowed herself the pleasure of his attentions once more. The lie that it was all for his sake, to soothe his pain and offer the gentleness that no one else would afford him, well, it was a lie she thought she could live with. When there were no words between them it was easy to live with indeed: they made their own alternative reality in her bed, the two of them answerable only to each other.

\---

Emily’s dreams were sometimes frightful things. Her husband did not know the horrors she had imagined since the accident, the visions of hellfire and torment. It might have been ironic had she stopped to consider the fact, but he was always present in her dreams, suffering with the other damned souls; sometimes with just cause, sometimes innocent of all accusations. Emily would scream herself hoarse to save him when the visions appeared to her as the latter scenario.

The quietude of mourning and the church had driven them back for a time, but since her poisoning and the hallucinations the ergot had produced they had returned, more vivid than ever. In a bed too large, in a cold room where the fire died down to embers in the late hours of the night, Emily Reid’s head tossed to and fro on the pillow. In her dreams were fire and water; heat and a foul stench; colours too bright and clashing; and someone distant, screaming.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

 

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white.

 

And some in dreams assurèd were

Of the Spirit that plagued us so;

Nine fathom deep he had followed us

From the land of mist and snow.

 

And every tongue, through utter drought,

Was withered at the root;

We could not speak, no more than if

We had been choked with soot.

 

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, the Albatross

About my neck was hung.

 

Emily saw her husband emerge from the brightest part of the dream: whether it was the sun-scorched reflection of still water, or the pale heat at the heart of the flames she could not be sure. His clothes were tattered and he cradled his arms to his chest. She flinched back from the uncomfortable warmth that radiated from the sight, but she could not look away, no matter how her neck craned on the pillow. As the light around him faded, or her mind’s eye adjusted, she saw he cradled some shape, something that clung about his person. Did she imagine small arms reaching up to his neck, a trail of red hair draped over his arm?

Emily held her breath, in the dream and in her sleep. Edmund began to come into focus and she saw the devotion with which he looked on whatever it was his arms held. But it now seemed to her that there was nothing there; they formed a hollow shape, carried awkwardly to frame the burns that covered his body. Where she had thought she saw a little girl’s hair she now saw raw flesh bleeding, the silhouette of their daughter burned onto him.

Emily awoke with a scream on her lips. Her knuckles ached where they crushed the feathery duvet in her tightly balled fists.

A habit never broken, she looked over to the other side of the bed. The pillow was undisturbed, the covers only crumpled because of the vigorous kicking she had performed on her side of the mattress. She shivered in the cold night air and looked at the softly glowing fire. She wanted to douse it in water, to extinguish it utterly.

Instead, she drew a shaky breath and wearily swung her legs out, gathering the strength to stand and shuffle over to the dressing table. With clammy hands and unsteady fingers she rummaged through the top drawer, eventually coming across the little brown bottle she had been prescribed to help her recover from the poison. She added a drop of its contents to the glass of water by the bed, the thought of the laudanum’s embrace helping to steady her movements in anticipation of its effects.

She drank the mixture down eagerly and sank back into the bed-clothes, cooled already from exposure to the chilly atmosphere of the room. Her sleep would be undisturbed this time.

\---

In Deborah Goren’s little room there was just enough air for two, but Edmund sat on the edge of the bed gasping for breath. She surveyed him quietly, wrapped in a sweat-soaked sheet that did not grow cool whilst the fire continued to crackle happily in its grate. They had barely begun to talk when the current case came up. She was quite happy to listen to case-work, but when he expressed once more the belief that Mathilda lived, and that his current suspect might provide an avenue to learning something of what had happened to her, Deborah thought of Mrs Reid’s words earlier. If there was hope, Mrs Reid deserved to share in that hope. The alternative reality of the room had been shattered, and Deborah pressed her lips together, resisted reaching out to stroke the curve of his bowed back.

A change had come over her as he spoke: the selfish pleasure she had taken in his company could no longer shout down the guilty voice that whispered to her of Mrs Reid, of her right to be talked to as he would now talk to Deborah. Her own desires must be forced back, themselves reduced to a whisper of longing, of the desire to let him stay, to smooth the damp hair back from his brow — where her adventuring fingers had displaced it hours before. But the weight of his want had grown heavy, and she grew uncomfortable under the suspicion that he thought he might find forgiveness more readily from her than from his wife.

It was easier not seeing his face as she firmly reminded him of Mrs Reid’s deserving person. She saw his shoulders tense, heard the wounded intake of breath. Her head bowed and she wished she could rest it against him, nuzzle the scarred shoulder and kiss its soft skin as she would not have hesitated to do earlier. But she would not make this more complicated than it had become already. Instead, she kept her head down, so that if he turned his own face towards her she might not see the tears that she was sure had welled up in his eyes. She could imagine the hurt expression all too clearly, but she made herself think too of Mrs Reid’s expression as she had told Deborah that his wife knew that  Edmund kept something from her.

She told him to go home and he stood obediently, dressed himself and left with nothing more than a sideways glance and a murmur of thanks. Deborah put her face in her hands and felt her features crumple. It was early yet, the oats for the children’s breakfast did not need preparing immediately. There was time for her to cry, even if there was not time to wonder whether it was motivated by self-pity or the weariness she felt at all the sadness people put themselves through. She stifled the sound of her sobs with the sheet that still smelled of him.

\---

In the cold living room Edmund waited. Upstairs, Emily seemed to sleep peacefully, so he let her. The house throbbed with regret and sullen lifelessness: its fires had all died down in the dawn hours and the pale early light gave it the look of a faded photograph, preserving in stillness something that had passed.

Eventually there was a foot on the stairs and Emily seemed to sense his presence, for she came straight to the room in which he sat. He prepared his confession as he would a report to his superiors, whilst she arranged herself nervously on the edge of the chaise. Her question of whether he had been there all night went unanswered, but she did not seem to notice.

Emily was still feeling somewhat apart from the world after the dose of laudanum, but the horrors of her dream bubbled up at the sight of her husband. She wrapped her gown tightly around her, watching his face as he began to tell the story of the day of the steamer accident. As he spoke her eyes wandered away from him and she pressed her forehead to her splayed fingers, eyes wide as she tried to avoid bringing the vivid images he described to life in her mind. Anger coursed through her when he told her the boat trip had been part of his investigation. Her hands shook, so she balled one into a fist and pressed the fingers of the other harder to her temples. He listed the most banal details from that precise memory of his that had once astonished and delighted her. Now it made her feel nauseous, that details of a criminal and his intended victim should intrude on the story of the loss of their daughter.

But the notion that he ended his tale with! The notion that this Silver had survived unnoticed, had been in a position to see Mathilda’s fate, that he could have an inkling of what had become of her…Emily could not think one coherent thought. Perhaps Edmund hoped for gratitude, the warmth of forgiveness from her, but she could only let the tears course over her face and wonder that he still did not show emotion. She felt pierced by the revelation that he brought, stricken as though with a fever. Had he lived with such awful hope for the past year? Her shoulders shook with silent sobs as she tried to comprehend the possibility of her daughter’s survival. At the edge of her thoughts darker fears swirled, tormenting her attempts to focus on any one thing: what if Silver had had Mathilda for the past year? What if they did get her back? Would she be the same? How would family life be renewed? The bitter words just exchanged about her last trip to see family in Harrow reminded her all too well that they had not enjoyed a happy, balanced life even before Mathilda had been lost.

Shortly, Edmund left for the station again, bolstered by the anticipation of catching his man and finally proving that he had been right about Mathilda’s survival all this time. Emily dressed without much thought to it, but as ever her features recovered quickly from grief. She arranged her hair, patted powder on her face and left for the shelter. Until news came she would keep herself busy, throw herself into familiar tasks to keep the tumult of her hopes and fears at bay.

\---

She received the news impassively. Silver was dead. A girl of the right age he had kept in his household was not Mathilda, but Mary. In relating this, Edmund sought to focus on the fact that Silver had known the torment he caused when he had tried to question him over Mathilda; that Silver’s survival and his memory of their girl pointed to her own chances of survival.

But Emily could not reign in the false hope she felt had been awakened in her, could not reduce it back down to shadows and rumours when she had been offered a tangible person, a connection that could be questioned directly. She nodded dumbly at Edmund’s insistence that he would keep looking; keep hoping; that he would find their daughter eventually. For Edmund, for now, this seemed to be enough of an acknowledgement from her. He was himself rattled by the loss of Silver and could barely accept the case as a victory. He was cheered by Jackson’s acquittal, but Emily knew what this meant: more hours with Drake and Jackson; the same unfamiliarity with his home that he had steadily cultivated over the past years.

She had finally been let in on the reason for his ruthless belief in Mathilda’s survival. For this reason Emily thought she sensed a tentative renewal of some of the old alliance they had shared. From Silver’s death he was more willing to reach out to her: an arm finding its way around her shoulders as they walked; a warm palm on the small of her back when they stood by each other; fingers entwining with hers during a silent carriage ride. It was a welcome comfort, but she balked at the thought that she had needed to share in his ghost hunt to receive it.

Emily saw the relief on Bennet Drake’s face when Edmund stood by her like this. It was not personal to Drake, she knew he meant only well, but her flesh crawled at the reminder of the public’s stake in her marriage. Edmund’s colleagues were so proud and happy to see them back to normal — whatever that had once been. Edmund had finally come clean, confessed all to his adoring wife, who had forgiven him in a heartbeat, was all too glad to share in his wish that Mathilda could be found and saw now the folly of her year of mourning, of pushing him away. She was convinced that this was what these men saw, and it made Emily resent Edmund’s touch more than she was willing to admit.

\---

Deborah smiled her welcome as sincerely as she always did, especially to the bemused young girl Mrs Reid ushered in beside her. Words of reassurance came easily when she looked on this wide-eyed newcomer. The girl was quiet, but she would open up and find her place amongst the other children: Deborah Goren was certain of that.

She felt her smile grow a little more crooked as she looked on the Reids. Edmund hung back at the door to the kitchen, his expression inscrutable. Emily was as cheerful as she had always been in public, but Deborah wondered whether she was perhaps just as adept at hiding her emotions as her husband was. The two left together, Edmund casting glances suffused with reproachful longing back at her even as his arm wound itself around his wife’s back. Deborah watched them go and tried not to doubt the picture of renewed happiness that they seemed to present, strolling across the yard outside, arms and hands entwined like young lovers. She recalled that she had sent Edmund away with the reminder that it was not for her to forgive him, nor to share his hope of a return to his old life. With this in mind she told herself that it was also not her place to question Mrs Reid’s forgiveness or hope, and she sighed and returned to the day’s work.

Whilst she organised the washing and drying of the dishes from the evening meal, Deborah sent a pair of the children to her cousin Isaac. The new girl, Mary, had barely spoken all day, but the other children had been mostly welcoming. As far as she could tell they had obeyed her recommendation not to ask about a newcomer’s past immediately. She collected the book of stories that she had been reading to them — on special nights only — and was heartened by the gaggle of enthusiastic cheers that met the gesture. “Wash your faces, get yourselves ready for bed. Then we will read,” she told them.

Isaac and the others returned before she had finished reading. He nodded to her from the door to the dormitory room and went to wait for her in the kitchen. She heard the cupboards open, the clink of glasses. She finished the story and wished each child goodnight. She came to Mary last, whispered reassurances that she would soon settle in, and left them to sleep.

In the kitchen Isaac gestured to the bench across the table from him. Two glasses of vodka sat on the surface and Deborah grasped one gratefully, swinging herself wearily into the seat. Without words, she met his serious gaze with a rueful but grateful smile as they touched the glasses together.

He was the more reticent of her cousins; Joshua had sympathised better, whereas Isaac would listen calmly and offer some useless advice as to how she should have behaved. But still, he had come at her behest, and between them they would try to make up for Joshua’s absence by being more patient with each other. She began to talk, plunging into the language of her family with relief, finding words that expressed more truly herself and her feelings.

Isaac listened impassively whilst she told him of the affair. He had seen his cousin rail against undeserving boys who could not appreciate the depths of her heart, had seen her smash her fist on tables at the injustices of her life, and then at the injustices of her people’s lives. The young woman he had grown up alongside had drunk in every scrap of knowledge she could pry from the students of the new university in her city, and she had turned this knowledge sometimes on the foolishness of others, sometimes on herself in the way of all youths. He had seen it, and her, flourish as she went about the task of running the orphanage, finally something that required the conviction and determination that had had no focus before then. Yet it was also a task that suited the depth of her feeling, draining never enough to empty her, but always giving back enough love and gratitude to sustain her enthusiastic efforts.

Refreshing the glasses they held as necessary, Isaac saw his cousin’s willing compassion more drained now than it had ever been. She had poured her sympathy into a bottomless well, and ‘though she now tried to pull away from its abyss, still too much of her leaked into the emptiness that could not reciprocate.

“He is a man I respect,” was all he said when she stopped talking. She curled her lip at him, flicked a curl from her face and drank a gulp from her glass, glaring at him over the rim. Here came the response she expected. Isaac shrugged, “but he can only travel in one direction. Deborah, you have been caught up in the wake of a life that will rest for nothing until it achieves its hopeless goal. Mark my words, his confession to his wife will not bring him back the life he has lost. He will be at your door again, and if you keep trying to bring comfort to him you will only be further implicated in the shame and tragedy this will end with.” She smiled again now, her eyes a little glassy with tears, but she nodded at him.

“I know, cousin,” she whispered. “I know it.”

Isaac removed his glasses and rubbed the dust from them with a handkerchief. They were not too dirty at all, but he wished to look away from the expression he recognised so well. Deborah never turned anyone from her door in need.

“Of course, you will call me cynical,” he sighed, replacing the lenses on the bridge of his nose and trying to smile reassurance at her.

“Cynical? No-oo, Isaac!” she burst into laughter, enjoying the nostalgic pantomime. “You are merely the one man in this cruel world who truly understands it!” Still giggling, she covered her mouth with a hand, the exclamation having emerged louder than intended. Isaac chuckled, feeling a warm prickling in his eyes and cheeks. Joshua’s words in Deborah’s mouth; he felt more homesick than he had in some time.

He shook his head, finished the last of his drink. “Come now. It is good to talk, is it not? Be careful though, Deborah. This city is more fond of scandal than the city we made our childish mistakes in.”

She stood to envelop him in a tight embrace. “I know,” she repeated. She leaned closer and whispered, “but I fear I may be more fond of him than of any of my childhood mistakes.”

They exchanged resigned smiles. He knew she would do what she felt right with doing, and she knew he would steadfastly support her in whatever that was. But the warning of what had already been embarked upon hung in the air between them, and neither would deny its seriousness. Deborah cleared the glasses and near-empty bottle away, washed her face in the cold water of the tap at the sink, and departed to her bedroom alone to sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

It was late, and Edmund Reid was still in the office. An unfinished mug of coffee sat next to an unfinished glass of whisky. An unfinished book lay open on top of case-notes recording the death of a man whose story had been lost with him: unfinished. Edmund’s fingers massaged his temples as he thought about how much emotions were like the water. The ebb and flow of them was continuous: once felt one could not simply remove an emotion. The weather might whip them up of course, heightening them, making them raw and choppy. In the vast seas of this world, the emotions of different people came together in great whirlpools and eddies, confusing the currents of both. Confessing his purpose in taking Mathilda onto the steamer had created a lull at first, calming the surface of his feelings. But it had unwittingly stirred up something in the depths of Emily that he saw begin to rise and swell. And the calm of one feeling was soon overlapped by a giddy rush of memory. Edmund sat alone in his office, afraid of what he had awoken in his wife, whilst he remained cruelly unable to put the memory of a small bedroom above a Jewish orphanage out of his mind.

He could not get beyond the notion that recent events had not really changed anything. The change he had worried about in this very station only days before now seemed a vision of vanity. One visit to Deborah had not put her from his mind; nor had two. Neither had taken away the ache in his chest, even if he had experienced a brief respite. Confessing his guilt to Emily had similarly offered temporary relief, but now that nought had come of his hope to interrogate Silver he found himself once more with nothing but his own conviction that Mathilda lived. Waves of promise washed over by waves of unrelenting, unfulfilled want.

It was late, and Edmund Reid was still in the office, and nothing changed.

\---

Emily grew glad of the empty house. She had never felt the need to share her nightmares with Edmund, though she might once have thought that were he to return home she would no longer suffer from them. Now she had become resigned to the fact that honesty was not always the best policy.

The doses of laudanum it took to keep her dreams peaceful were increasing. The smell of the mixture brought back memories of her father, lost to the deluded raving of his sick mind shortly after she and Edmund had married. Her mother had moved north to Edinburgh to be with Emily’s sister, and now she could not even imagine what she would write to elicit a reunion. _Dear Mother, It’s your loving daughter, Emily. Since my Mathilda died, or perhaps did not die, because my husband saw fit to take her on a stakeout as part of the Ripper case, my marriage has become an empty shell of regrets, my husband is damned for all eternity in my dreams and spends barely a percentage of his life in our home, and my one companion at church was brutally murdered on the Whitechapel streets. I am sure all will be well, however. Anyway, it would be simply wonderful to catch up with you. Much love, Emily_.

At night she was most alone, but the laudanum was the smell of family.

During the day she still maintained the shelter, but the sheer volume of women to be admitted exhausted her. The exhaustion was added to by the worries she felt for those who stumbled back and forth between the shelter and the streets, unable to fix themselves to a steady course of change. There was always more funding to be begged for, and more women to be turned away for lack of beds.

Sometimes Deborah Goren visited the shelter; sometimes with a basket of food for the women who stayed there, sometimes with one to share with Mrs Reid. Emily poured out all her worries about those who came and went, railing against the circumstances that tugged them to and fro in life. Miss Goren would agree with every word, her eyes bright with understanding. “But you must not take it so personally, Mrs Reid,” was a common refrain. “These women…they are grown, they are adults who must decide for themselves. As you well know, coercion will not help. The shelter must be an open door, through which they may come and go. You do the right thing by them here.”

They would exchange polite smiles, both wondering at the fact that Deborah had referred to ‘the shelter’ when each woman felt her words so aptly fitted the expectations laid on themselves directly.

Emily strove not to mention Edmund again in their conversation. The deeper the chasm between them grew, the more she felt she must maintain the illusion of its absence. She would receive Miss Goren’s updates on Mary gratefully, and took care to ask after her, but neither woman returned to the circumstances of her discovery.

Deborah herself worried at Mrs Reid’s calm demeanour. She saw her only once a week or so, and each time she thought the other’s skin a little waxier, her cheekbones a little sharper. It became more common for the basket she brought to contain fruitcake for them to share together rather than the heavy rye and salted fish she brought for the immigrant women who ended up in the shelter.

Despite Isaac’s prediction she had received no visit from Edmund for a number of weeks, and she grew accustomed to the idea that he had moved on, placed his suffering once more in the drawer in his office desk. On nights when she found it difficult to sleep she might find herself examining the stabs of jealousy that accompanied thoughts of him; she might imagine that the American who worked with Edmund had introduced him to the more prosaic relief provided by the brothel he himself rented a room from. Or, on darker nights when she would force herself to sit up and read rather than continue to let herself think ill of it, she might entertain the fear that he returned home. She hated this fear the most, and almost threw up old prayers of forgiveness for the lack of charity it revealed. But her meetings with Mrs Reid always convinced her that his wife’s studious omission of him from conversation did not by any means betoken a return to a happy home life.

\---

The lengthening days of summer did not slow the everyday business of Whitechapel’s criminals. The smog and humidity raised tensions everywhere and few people worried about waiting until the dark nights to take out their grievances. Edmund was kept as busy as he liked to be kept, patrolling familiar streets with the newly-wed Sergeant Drake and watching Leman Street slowly pick itself up from the blow that had been the loss of Dick Hobbs. Jackson was as reliable as ever, both in the dissoluteness of his habits and in the fine precision of his work when it was called for. The turbulent waves caused by Silver’s death had passed by, and Edmund let himself imagine that because his work had returned to its normal pace, all else in his life had settled back into habit.

On this day, he had had a particularly long and grubby morning investigating a spate of grave robberies. The sickly sweet smell of lye and loam and flesh seemed to cling to him and Drake as they returned to the station around lunchtime. As a concession to the increased temperature he had shed his outer coat but still swathed himself in the thick three-piece wool that was his uniform and his armour. Drake had his own jacket slung over his back, elbow up to reveal the yellowing armpit of his muddied shirt. “Sir, I’ll just be popping home for a fresh set of clothes if that’s no bother to you?”

“By all means, Sergeant,” Edmund nodded. “I should think it would bother our colleagues far less if we were both to do so.”

Drake left him as they passed the rickety front door of the home he now shared with Bella, his wife. Edmund grimaced a little; deep down he remained cynical of Bennet’s determination to rehabilitate one or another of Long Susan’s girls, but he could not deny that the two of them presented a far more blissful picture of the married state than he would ever have expected. He knew he should not begrudge his old friend that happiness, but when it kept Bennet from the overtime he had formerly been happy to share with Edmund, well, then the contrast with his own state of affairs irked him sorely.

He was soon at his own front door; daylight hours were now the only time he really saw it. Emily was rarely in then, letting the women’s shelter take up more and more of her own time. Like Drake’s marriage, Edmund thought it something of a lost cause, but it did mean no awkward encounters when he slunk in for a change of clothes, or to pick up some item from the home office he now never used.

He went into the bright little room and opened the wardrobe door, pausing with an astonished blink when he did so. There were no clean shirts on the rail. He pushed the spare suits aside to be sure, reached in a hand and patted the surface underneath to check that none had fallen from its hanger. Dumbstruck, he turned and saw the overflowing laundry basket, just as it had been yesterday. “Emily?!” he shouted, cold panic washing over him.

Edmund dashed from the room, flying up the stairs two at a time. He slammed doors open, shuddering briefly at the emptiness of Mathilda’s old space. The bedroom he used to share with his wife was empty; he could be certain that she was not at home. Panting, and pressing his palm against the revival of a dull ache in his left shoulder, he surveyed the scene. The fireplace had been neglected, clearly just left to go out on the last day it had been cool enough to be needed. The bed was made and all looked tidy otherwise, but a fine layer of dust covered many of the surfaces, not least the mirror above the fireplace. He walked over to the dressing table, his reflection a blur in the dirty surface as he passed it.

The dust on the dresser was disturbed above the drawer, where a few sticky rings of some substance formed overlapping patterns. He held his breath as he pulled the drawer open, pushed jewellery boxes, packets of dressing, tape and other medical supplies aside. He studied the little bottles at the back; all were the common contents of household cupboards. He suspected which one had formed the residue on the surface of the dresser, let his fingers linger on the cap as he frowned down at it. Why should Emily not have as peaceful a sleep as he longed to have? He was not entirely surprised that she needed the assistance of the laudanum to sleep, indeed was a little glad of it; her composure was too chilly and daunting otherwise.

Still it troubled him. In combination with the unwashed laundry he felt suddenly afraid of the things he no longer knew about his wife. He shut the drawer a little too forcefully, rattling its contents as he did so.

Edmund returned downstairs and looked thoughtfully on the laundry basket once more. Stricken with something between embarrassment and trepidation, like a child attempting an independent task for the first time, he cast about for an old leather case. He filled it with shirts and underclothes, hesitated, then snapped it shut. There were plenty of steamies on the streets around the station, he would simply leave this bundle with one of them. He would let Emily keep her disturbed sleep a secret, would not confront her over this household chore when he performed no duties about the home himself.

His return to the station was interrupted before he had shed the load of laundry, however. “Inspector!” he turned to see Jackson jogging towards him, one hand aloft to catch his attention.

“Captain Jackson,” he nodded, fingers fidgeting on the handle of the case he carried.

Jackson’s eyes, which never missed a detail, flicked down to it. His brows raised momentarily in a query, but he said nothing of those thoughts aloud. “Ah, there’s news of the break-ins at the brothel. One of the girls has found the window that’s been jimmied these two nights past. First floor. Will you see it?”

Edmund nodded again curtly. “Of course. Lead the way.”

By the time the two of them had examined the chipped wood on the high window and studied the exterior of the building, a theory of how the thief had gained entrance to the upper level was forming between them. Edmund had almost forgotten the task that had been interrupted as he and Jackson had discussed the likely implement that had been used to force the window. But as he took down the last notes on it and followed Jackson from the room, there was a gentle cough from behind him. Jackson glanced back when Edmund turned, but discretely kept walking. Susan, who had listened to all of their analysis of the scene, now stood behind, holding the leather case Edmund had brought.

“Inspector, do not forget your belongings,” she smiled, holding it out.

He swallowed as a sudden thought struck him. Jackson was not the tidiest of men, but someone had to do his laundry occasionally, and Susan, meanwhile, was always arrayed impeccably, as were her girls. He opened his mouth; stopped; held up a finger; then closed the door. Susan simply gazed at him impassively with the face of a woman who had to act as though she already knew everyone’s secrets even before they did.

“Miss Hart, might I ask a service of you?”

She pressed her lips together in a smirk. “Many do, inspector. I wondered whether you would ever join their ranks. Has one of my girls caught your eye?”

He closed his eyes in exasperation. “No. Inside that case…” he gestured at it. “If I pay you as an intermediary, would you see to it that the items inside are returned — cleaned, dried and pressed — as soon as is possible?”

The smirk faded from her face and she let the arm that held the bag out drop. “I am sorry,” she said quietly. He could not meet Susan’s all too knowing gaze. She had fixed it on both him and Emily at the celebrations following Sergeant Drake’s wedding and now once more she perceived everything that went unsaid in public. But she was nothing if not discrete, and a businesswoman to the end. She named a price and they shook hands.

Edmund paused once more before opening the door. “I would rather this matter did not pass between yourself and Captain Jackson,” he told her.

“Why should it?” she shrugged easily. “Have no fear, Inspector, Captain Jackson shall remain in perfect ignorance of this building’s laundry arrangements.”

He nodded gratitude and stepped out of the room, parting with words of reassurance that the brothel’s petty thief would be tracked down in no time.

\---

The final weight of the realisation that it was too late to return crept up quietly on him, eventually pouring a cold shiver down his back as he wrote up reports that evening.

Outside his office the station bustled with the end-of-day hubbub of people coming and going, visitors, prisoners and police alike. For the first time in too long he found that he really, truly wanted to go home. He wanted to beg forgiveness from the one person who could grant it, to soothe her furrowed brow and to lull her to a natural sleep with soft words and kisses sweeter than laudanum. He imagined leaving his chair that moment, picking up warm-wrapped fish and chips from the corner shop they used to visit, entering the front door to her delight and astonishment.

It was the most fanciful thought he had caught himself having in some time and he rubbed the bridge of his nose in frustration at it. Too little and too late. As a gesture, he examined who he thought such actions could possibly benefit: not Emily, who would not react as the stranger he imagined, mercurial enough to welcome him home with open arms after years of creeping neglect and absence. Perhaps himself: a return to the easy respectability of his youth. But the life such a scheme would return him to was one that he was even less fit for now than when he had first begun to drift away from it.

He felt another force involved here, and he did not credit himself for the motivation when he eventually discovered what it was: he had promised Deborah Goren he would try to reclaim his marriage. Not aloud, when she had told him in no uncertain terms to go home. Not with the pressure of grief on his throat and a wild distrust of his emotions at that moment. But he had promised it silently as he followed her instructions and walked home that chilly morning. Whether it had been a hopeless promise to make, or whether even then he bore the blame for failing to fulfil it, he admitted that he might never know.

Edmund did not want to be alone in his office that night though, that much he had become certain of. He opened the office door as Sergeant Drake walked by with a cheery wave. “Sergeant! A swift drink in the Bear before you go home?”

The other man paused, cocked his head to one side and then nodded. “Aye sir. One swift one would be mighty refreshing on a day like this!”

“Good man,” Edmund smiled perfunctorily, gathering his jacket and hat and slapping Drake on the shoulder as they both strode from the station.

Seated at the bar, a pint in front of his friend and a whisky in his own hands, peace descended a little on the day. The evening sun sparkled through the grubby glass at the front of the building, revealing the dust that glittered in the smoke-filled atmosphere of the pub. The moment was only soured when, having touched glasses with an exclamation of “cheers”, Bennet took a large gulp of ale and side-eyed Edmund.

“Begging your pardon, sir.”

Edmund raised his eyebrows, drawing a draft of his own drink. “Hmm?”

“Well sir, forgive me if I overstep, but, er, you do still reek of the charnel house somewhat. What happened to that change of shirt?”

Bennet’s wide-eyed expression was the picture of innocent intent, but Edmund knew this man was too canny by far for such a question to come without subtext. He studied Bennet for a moment, then dropped his eyes to his glass and took another drink. “Emily must have miscalculated this week. It has been stifling weather and I have no doubt been going through them faster than she is used.”

His friend nodded silently, returning his eyes to his own drink. His mouth worked in that way that Edmund recognised though, as if he were trying the feel of a sentence on his tongue before letting it be spoken aloud.

Pre-emptively, Edmund added, “and I am sure your Bella struggles likewise to keep up. These streets are full of dirty work!”

“Quite, sir,” Bennet agreed before swilling another mouthful of ale around his mouth. “How, er, how is Mrs Reid?”

Edmund’s eyes shot him daggers. He should have known better than to seek the refuge of a quiet drink with someone who had been close to his home affairs for so long. He pressed his lips together. He fidgeted on the bar stool and drank the last of his whisky. He summoned the bartender to bring the bottle to him again.

Bennet waited patiently.

“She is…” he sought for words, gazed wide-eyed into space. Today’s revelations had made the usual vague untruths seem hollower than ever. “She is very busy with the shelter,” he shrugged eventually.

Bennet scrunched his nose up at this, but said nothing immediately, again turning to his pint. “Her work is truly noble,” he finally replied. “She has helped to set Miss Rose—Miss _Erskine_ ,” he corrected himself, “right up. You know she now has a billing in the music hall? Is doing very well for herself. So they say.” He added the last bit more quietly, and Edmund’s shoulders and expression relaxed. His own mess of a marriage had been deflected from the conversation by Bennet’s lingering tenderness towards Rose Erskine.

He gave Bennet a sad smile: “yes, so they do.” Edmund raised his glass again and Bennet clinked his against it once more before downing the last large mouthful of ale.

“Sorry sir, you did say a brief one. Bella will be waiting,” he stood, saying those last words with the same measure of surprise at himself as always, but with an added dose of apology to the present company.

Edmund bit the inside of his bottom lip, souring an already crooked smile. He gave a silent nod in acknowledgement as Bennet left him alone with the second glass of whisky.

He wondered whether he should have sent word to find Jackson; whether the American would be more reliable company than Sergeant Drake could be. Yet the idea of conversation with a married man who lived in a brothel run by his own wife, who moved from room to room as he chose…no. Edmund decided he could not face Jackson’s own brand of New World — admittedly well-intentioned — logic at this point.

He poured a third glass of whisky whilst he thought about where the night might take him. If not home or the office…? The answer was obvious, but he was reticent to meet it head-on, and so he retreated to a darker corner of the pub as it began to fill up. He would drink this glass more slowly, think about what he could say if he appeared on that doorstep again after a month’s absence.

\---

   And Lancelot answered nothing, but he went,  
And at the inrunning of a little brook  
Sat by the river in a cove, and watched  
The high reed wave, and lifted up his eyes  
And saw the barge that brought her moving down,  
Far-off, a blot upon the stream, and said  
Low in himself, “Ah simple heart and sweet,  
Ye loved me, damsel, surely with a love  
Far tenderer than my Queen's. Pray for thy soul?  
Ay, that will I. Farewell too--now at last--  
Farewell, fair lily. ‘Jealousy in love?’  
Not rather dead love's harsh heir, jealous pride?  
Queen, if I grant the jealousy as of love,  
May not your crescent fear for name and fame  
Speak, as it waxes, of a love that wanes?”

Deborah sat tensely on the bench in the kitchen, hunched close to the candle by which she read her newly acquired collection of Tennyson. She was utterly enraptured by the words, straining to complete the poem _Lancelot and Elaine_ before she took herself to bed. A cup of mint-infused tea grew cold by her, and she twirled one curl of her hair compulsively as she read.

The orphanage was never fully silent. The bunk beds in the dormitory creaked as a child turned over; the fire she kept even through summer spat sullenly into embers, and the taps of all the sinks dripped, each one at a different pace. At first she thought a quiet knock in the darkness was just the clunk of a water pipe in the depths of the building responding to some shift in its atmosphere, and so she read on. At the next knock she looked up with a frown, trying to assess whether the sound came from the children’s room. It did not continue, so she returned to the page, finally jumping to her feet with a shock at the third, most insistent rapping.

Trying to calm the panicked gasps that arose in her, she chose to leave the candle on the table. Instead, she reached for the potato knife from the high shelf by the sink and crept towards the door. First checking that all the bolts on the outer door remained in place, she moved up close to its surface, pressing her skin to the painted wood so that she could peer out through the crack between door and frame. What she saw made her sigh in both relief and trepidation and return to the kitchen. Slowly, deliberately, she replaced the knife and picked up the candle, telling herself that if he still waited for her at this point then she owed him an audience.

He still waited, but she stood in the doorway, not inviting him in immediately.

She folded her arms across her chest as best as she could with the candle in one hand and gave him a questioning look. On this muggy night he still wore the thick suit she remembered, though she noted that beneath the whiff of spirits he smelled of someone who had had a long and busy couple of days on the crowded streets of Whitechapel. She would define it as the smell of someone who had not been home recently enough.

“I apologise,” he began with the barest hint of a shrug.

She felt her eyebrows rise higher in incredulity.

“I did not mean to disturb you again.”

Deborah simply waited, watching him shuffle awkwardly.

“This is, I…I am sorry I have not seen you in so long.”

Now her frown returned; there was no pleasure to be had in cat-like games, in torturing a wounded animal. His words were confused and he began to pace.

“Edmund,” she murmured, stepping from the threshold to catch his arm. “What is it that you want?”

He turned to look at her fully, eyes wide, pleading. “I cannot say. But I do not come to you for forgiveness, nor for the replacement of hope.” Conviction returned to his voice in the last sentence. “I needed…I need to be with somebody tonight. There is no other...” he shook his head hopelessly.

She sighed and turned her head away from the desperation in his eyes. “Come in,” she relented, as she knew she always would.

The door closed and she assessed him in the corridor. “It is late, and it will make noise, but I will run water for the bath.”

He appeared taken aback at first and then looked down at his tired-looking suit and cleared his throat self-consciously. She led him into the hall where the children’s lessons took place during the day. Edmund watched in silence as she went about building up the fire. Having completed that, she moved behind a worn wicker screen and hauled the tin bath out, the sound muffled by the rag-rug she pulled it along on. As she tugged, she felt a soft touch on her shoulder. “Let me help,” he told her.

She straightened, brushing hair from her face. He was now standing very close, his face lit by the fire behind her. Her cheeks suddenly felt very hot. “Please, be my guest,” she said breathlessly, gesturing towards the bath.

Edmund pressed his lips together ruefully, staring a little too long at her face and making her bow it down, ducking away from the intensity. “Everything around me may fall apart,” he mused, “but the indomitable Miss Goren continues her work, providing respite and refuge for those in need.”

She bridled at this, though his tone was sincere. He saw the anger rise in her eyes, however, and caught her before she could step away. “I do not mock! I do not mock you. I am in awe of you.”

Deborah swallowed at the fierceness of his voice, wavered for a moment in the tight grip of his hands on her elbows. Her lips involuntarily curled, somewhere between a smile and a grimace as she battled down the memories of two nights, shared many weeks ago; memories now fighting to break free from the impossibility she had consigned them to.

She licked her bottom lip and met his eyes. He repeated his last words and they spoke to her of all that she had tried to do and be: for him, for Mrs Reid, for the orphanage and the community, since she had arrived in London, even since before she had left Kyiv. Deborah was an unassuming person who would not dream of demanding recognition for what she did simply because it was the right thing for her to do. But it was hard not to acknowledge recognition when it came in such a powerful form. She stopped leaning back in his grasp and raised her hands to cup them behind his neck, kissing him thirstily as he gladly pulled her close.

If anyone woke and peeked around the dormitory door at the noise of water running, or at any noise, then the couple in the hall did not notice. Edmund closed his eyes peacefully in the warm bath at its comfortable distance from the fire. Deborah sat on a chair by his head, one hand stroking his hair whilst the other held her copy of Tennyson, from which she read aloud in her gentle, sing-song voice.

Descending thro' the dismal night — a night

In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost —

Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps

It seem'd in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof

A dragon wing'd, and all from stem to stern

Bright with a shining people on the decks.

And gone as soon as seen. And then the two

Dropt to the cove, and watch'd the great sea fall.

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last.

Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep

And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged

Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame…


	3. Chapter 3

Dressed in one of either Isaac or Joshua Bloom’s old shirts, donated for the orphans of Miss Goren’s house, Edmund returned to Leman Street with a spring in his step. It was soon allayed by Artherton’s serious face as he entered the building, however.

“Ah, Inspector!”

“Yes Artherton, what is it?”

“I’ve a message here for you, sir.” Artherton’s expression seemed to shuffle uneasily under his great beard. “Left last night.”

“Oh really?” Edmund strode to the desk, craning his neck as he arrived opposite Artherton to try to spy what it was.

“Yes sir. From your wife, sir.” Artherton’s eyes rolled uneasily away from Edmund’s fierce gaze.

“What? Emily was here? Last night?”

“Apparently so, sir. She, ah, she thought you’d be here as you, ah, you weren’t at home. She was looking for you, sir.”

“Evidently!” Edmund snapped, snatching the scrap of paper from under Artherton’s fingers. “Thank you, sergeant!” he exclaimed, turning sharply on his heel and slamming his office door behind him.

He knew his colleagues would stare at the sound but did not look up from the folded paper in his hand. Stony-faced, he confirmed the hand that had written his name on the outside to be Emily’s. His head swam with unarticulated thoughts of frustration and rage at the injustice of it. He thought he had given up all hope of that relationship last night: he had given the secrets she had kept his tacit blessing, had been willing to let her cope as she must cope, as he always had. Now this letter! Had she come as he had imagined he might appear at home, supper for both of them under her arm, words of welcome and forgiveness? Only to find him absent, the night staff under the assumption he had gone home; an assumption they would all now be re-evaluating in their own individual manners.

He put the letter down on the table, opened the door again, barked “Artherton, coffee!” and shut the door again, hard.

Breathing deeply, he looked down at the letter, where it mocked him from the desk. The door opened a fraction and Artherton handed a tin mug of steaming black coffee through. “Thank you. And tell those men to stop gawping and get on with their business.” Edmund gestured broadly to a number of figures in the entrance and Artherton nodded, reversing from the room obsequiously and drawing the door shut again.

He took a gulp of coffee, steeling himself to sit down and unfold the letter. He stalked around the desk to his chair, as though he might ambush the piece of paper from a new angle.

_Edmund_ ,

_I saw that you had been home earlier and came to find you. Work at the shelter this week has been wickedly difficult. One woman in particular has been in and out five times since last Wednesday and each time she returns covered in the marks of her oppressor. I cannot bear the sight of it, day in and day out. Hope for this place has become a guttering candle in a very dark shaft. I have formally handed over the running of the shelter to Ms Winstone, I believe it the only way to preserve my health._

_You will be pleased, no doubt, to know that your wife has abandoned this exertion that kept her from her home. I apologise regarding the shirts. I shall have all the time to see to them now._

_Had I seen you here tonight my intention was to ask you to investigate the man who so abuses my former tenant, Mrs Bryant. However, things are clearly busy enough at the station that you are kept from your desk through all hours, and I do not suppose that one extreme example of what I now know to be an all too common affliction in this city is enough to merit taking your attention from more worthy cases._

_Your Emily_.

The ink was unevenly distributed in the letter forms, as though she had pressed the nib of the pen too hard into the paper; some of the underscores had torn through the paper with the force she had applied. Before the words ‘Your Emily’ there were spots of black, where seemingly she had paused, starting a number of different phrases before she settled on the stark ending he now read.

He placed the letter gently on the table, his elbows to each side of it. Hunched over, he ran desperate fingers through his hair, squeezing at his skull as though he could change the letter’s content by some mental exertion.

The bitterness of Emily Reid had grown unchecked since the case against the Silvers, since the dashed hope of finding Mathilda. Edmund let out a groan, seeing himself as a man trapped, damned for doing and damned for not doing. What if he had never told her the truth about that day? Would it have come to this, the end of another dream she had fought long and hard for?

He crumpled the sheet in a fist and stuffed it in his pocket. He drank the last of the thick coffee and left the office. “Sergeant, I am unavailable this morning. I shall return this afternoon, only make sure that Sergeant Drake has his report ready on the grave-robbings, and tell Captain Jackson I want an analysis of the mud outside Long Susan’s brothel where that thief set up his scaffold.”

“Aye, sir,” Artherton conceded, jotting down the introductions. His subsequent muttered words “good luck sir,” did not reach Edmund’s ears as he strode from Leman Street.

\---

“Emily?” he was barely in the door before her name escaped his lips, more fearfully than he had intended.

“Emily, it is Edmund!” He hung up his hat and glanced about the ground floor, quickly surmising that she was not there. He raced upstairs as he had done the day before and burst into the bedroom. His eyes alighted immediately on her small form dwarfed by the large bed, and her face, which was hideously pale in the low light of the room.

The bottle of laudanum stood empty on the dresser and he leapt to her side, hands shaking as they cupped her face. He struggled to compose himself enough to find a pulse, but the warmth of her skin was reassuring. “Emily, Emily! What have you done?” he cried, trying to lift her from the bed when he could not calm himself enough to seek her pulse. Edmund laid his head to her chest to discern a heartbeat, but was unsure whether he heard her blood pump or his own blood roaring in his ears.

In a moment his dilemma was at an end when she stirred languidly in his arms. “Edmund?” she weakly pushed him away so that she could see his face. “What is it?”

He gaped at her, grasped a reluctant hand. “I thought you had overdosed. I thought you had gone.”

Emily frowned, still coming around from the drug-induced sleep. “Mm, no, I was just…not dreaming,” she shook her head, trying to clear it. “Why are you here?”

“Your letter,” he said hoarsely. He reached out to stroke a lock of hair that was matted to her sweat-slicked face, but withdrew it as though burned when she tossed her head away from his touch. “You left a message for me at the station.”

Her eyes seemed to focus a little more on this and she turned her scowl back on him. “I did not ask you to come home.”

“No, not this time,” he accepted. “But I should have when you first asked.”

She freed her hand from his grip, sighed in resignation. “That cannot be helped now. If you are going to do something then go and question Ms Winstone, find out what has become of the woman I told you about in my letter.”

The fact that she did not ask where he had been if not at the station was like an iron brand pressed into his chest. He still leaned close to her but did not try to touch her again. “And will you not accompany me?”

“No,” she said listlessly. Her eyes focussed on a spot just shy of his jaw, avoiding his pained expression. “I will not go back there, I can do no more for them.”

“Then what will you do? You will take care of yourself? Should I send for a doctor?”

Her hand fanned the air dismissively. “Don’t be foolish, you have just startled me from my sleep. I shall be fine after some rest.” Her hand settled, to his surprise, on his right shoulder. He raised his own happily to it, stroking the skin of her fingers, which in turn played gently with his shirt collar.

Chastened at the idea that he had denied her well-needed rest, he plucked her hand from him and kissed it tenderly, planting another kiss on her forehead which she accepted without protest.

“I shall return later?”

She shrugged her ambivalence. “There is no need. Do what you will.”

“I will bring news of Mrs Bryant if I can.” He left and returned to work yet again.

 ---

Emily rubbed the fingers of her left hand together and gazed sadly at the rumpled spot where he had sat on the edge of the bed. She may not have cared much about maintaining the pointless machinations of a well-oiled household these days, but once she had striven to be the best of wives, and she knew every shirt her husband owned. Her fingers had felt the creases smooth out of each one countless times, following along in the heat of the iron’s path.

The one he wore was not one she recognised; and nor was it new, as the frayed thread at the collar’s edges proved. Habitual excuses surfaced on his behalf: perhaps he had borrowed it from another man at work. Bennet Drake and Homer Jackson were whippet-like to him though; their shirts would never have fitted over his broad shoulders comfortably. Abberline’s wardrobe would have fitted, but was far more old-fashioned than the shirt that Edmund wore.

Emily sighed again. The laudanum was finished, but she just wanted to go back to sleep. As if in a daze, she swung her feet from under the bedcovers and picked her quilted robe from the floor, wrapping it over her thin nightshirt.

She padded downstairs in bare feet. First she looked in on the office-cum-dressing-room he kept on the ground floor. She considered checking the laundry basket for any shirts he had left in it and burning a hole in each one with the iron. But this seemed like a degree of effort that was beyond her; Emily felt no heat of anger, just a dull acceptance. Whoever she was, this shirt-donor who had kept Edmund from his office last night, she would soon learn what Emily had learned too late: Edmund Reid cared for his work more than any human relationship.

She turned instead to the dining room, idly ran a finger along the dark wood of the liquor cabinet. She supposed most of it had migrated to his office by now, but was surprised to see a well-stocked collection when she opened its doors.

She cocked her head to one side, tried to discern what emotions she felt, and found herself finally empty. She selected a bottle of fine Scotch and tried a sip.

It burned and she retched, her empty stomach suddenly filled with fire. In horror she put it and the other whiskies aside. There was gin also, and port wine, and sherry. She tried the sherry next; it was dry, but the savoury taste was less repellent than the whisky had been.

Emily gathered the sherry and all the whisky she had removed and wandered into the kitchen, cradling them all. Standing by the sink, her feet growing icy on the stone floor, she poured every bottle of whisky away, all the while sipping away at the sherry from its decanter. She was surprised to find tears flowing down her cheeks, although she did not sob.

She dabbed at the wetness on her face with the collar of her nightdress and took another mouthful of sherry.

\---

Old habits die hard, and the best intentions may often be wildly misplaced. Edmund sent a constable to deliver a note to Emily from him. He wanted to let her know personally, that he was himself _personally_ looking into Mrs Bryant’s case. He had so many people to interview from the streets she might have been found in, from the area around the shelter and around her home, that he did not want Emily to think he was not putting his all into finding Mrs Bryant and ensuring her safety. As ever, it would likely have been better had he sent the constable to do the interviewing, and delivered the personal message in person.

Emily fumbled to pick up the envelope from the door mat. She saw Edmund’s writing and frowned unsteadily.

Holding it before her, she returned to the living room table and sat down heavily. After a while the sherry had made her sick, so she had tried the port. That too had made her ill, so she sipped at the clear gin as her fingers numbly battled with the folded paper.

She smiled sadly at the note. She congratulated herself on her foresight: had she genuinely thought he would be back that day she would never have allowed herself to reach such an unseemly state. To her chagrin, she was crying again.

Whenever it was that she finally crawled back into bed, the alcohol only poured its fuel on the flames of her dreams. They were more full than ever of hellfire and torment, family and loved ones reaching out of the flames either to drag her in with them or begging for her help where it was hopeless.

\---

Edmund could not send a runner to Miss Goren, so he went himself. “I will not stay long, I just need to know if you ever saw the woman Mrs Bryant at my wife’s shelter?”

She was folding clean bed linen as he stood by, and cast an arch glance at him.

“I heard today she has left it to the capabilities of Ms Winstone?”

“Yes, that is true,” he admitted. Deborah thought him shifty tonight, but perhaps it was just the professional demeanour he deemed necessary when asking questions about a case.

She decided that whatever details were missing from his conversation now would soon become clear via some other channel. “Yes, I spoke to Mrs Bryant once or twice. Her husband was an entitled swine.”

“So I understand,” he shifted his weight where he leant on the counter watching her work. “Do you remember any details about their life other than that particular one?”

Deborah glanced at him coolly. “Help me fold these sheets whilst I remember, I am sure it will come to me.”

He fumbled to keep up with her practiced hands but did as she requested and soon all the spare bed clothes were arranged in piles for her to put away.

“She once told me about her refuge outside the shelter, where she used to go until she feared he had discovered it. A spit of land by the river I believe. Somewhere sheltered where she watched the wildlife and the sunset.”

“Thank you,” he said warmly. He finally let himself reach out to her, grasping her by her stiff, corseted waist. “Thank you.”

She failed to suppress a smile. “Go on, go and help this poor woman,” her hands pressed down gently on his. He leaned in to steal one final, lingering kiss, then left her to her arrangements. She smoothed her skirts, feeling almost as skittish as she had when they had first kissed following his declaration of thanks. She returned to the piles of sheets, minding the task less even than usual.

\---

In the dawn light Edmund and Bennet stood side by side on the edge of the river, their shoes and trousers spattered with estuary mud. The rough reeds and grasses around them whispered in the tentative breeze and water birds dabbled merrily in the shallows.

Mrs Bryant and her husband lay side by side in a hollow in the mud that looked as though it had been carved out by hand. Water was already seeping up from its bottom, soaking the clothes of the two bodies.

“He dug the shallow grave, brought her here and killed her. He lay down beside and did himself in.” Bennet stated dutifully.

Edmund blinked slowly and sighed. “Yes, I suspect that is exactly it. Captain Jackson can check the mud on Mr Bryant’s hands, check that the implement that cut her throat also cut his. But the blood is here. There is a knife in his hand. I see no need for any explanation other than the obvious.”

“How long do you think it’s been?” Bennet squinted at him as the sun rose high enough to slant its rays off the water.

He shrugged, surveyed the scene again and again. “Long enough. I do not think we would have prevented this yesterday.” The night before last…? Well, Jackson would let him know his level of responsibility there.

“I must go and tell Emily,” he said mechanically, turning away from the bodies at last.

“Give…give her my best, as always,” Bennet called falteringly after him.

\---

She was curled tight under the covers, her hands balled into fists. Edmund sat on the edge of the bed again and placed a hand on the duvet where her shoulder jutted upwards.

“You were too late,” her voice rose through tears and the bedcovers and her interlocked arms, clenched protectively about herself.

Edmund closed his eyes and sat up straighter. “Am I not always?”

She sniffed wetly. “What does it matter? Maybe she is finally at peace now.”

He sat in silence, looking miserably at the material of his own trousers whilst Emily remained still beside him. Eventually he stood and waited for a moment by the bedside, hoping perhaps for some instruction.

Emily said nothing. She may have gone back to sleep; he could not see her face.

He left the house.

\---

Emily’s head throbbed. Her eyes pounded and if she moved her tongue within her mouth she wanted to retch. It seemed simplest to give into necessity, so she pulled out the chamber pot from beneath the bed and forced the bile and remnants of gin still in her stomach out.

It did not help. She stumbled downstairs and tried cleaning her mouth with water, but this only made the taste of stale alcohol stronger. Moaning in self-pity, she went back to the drinks cabinet and began to finish the decanters that had gone untouched the day before.

\---

The western wave was all a-flame.

The day was well nigh done!

Almost upon the western wave

Rested the broad bright Sun;

When that strange shape drove suddenly

Betwixt us and the Sun.

 

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,

(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)

As if through a dungeon-grate he peered

With broad and burning face.

 

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)

How fast she nears and nears!

Are those  _her_  sails that glance in the Sun,

Like restless gossameres?

 

Are those her  _ribs_  through which the Sun

Did peer, as through a grate?

And is that Woman all her crew?

Is that a DEATH? and are there two?

Is DEATH that woman's mate?

 

_Her_  lips were red,  _her_  looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold:

Her skin was as white as leprosy,

The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,

Who thicks man's blood with cold.

 

\---

Her father had been convinced that his body was made of dynamite. He was paralysed with fear when her sister raced at him, craving nothing more than the warm embrace she had not felt in the months since their last meeting.

Emily remembered the white-washed room that they had visited her father in. In and out over the years, sometimes at peace with himself and able to come home; sometimes a danger to himself and in need of the extra restraints and medicines that only the professionals could provide.

She drank and she read old letters and she looked through Mathilda’s belongings in the chest upstairs. She was not like her father, she decided. If anyone was covered in dynamite it was her husband. By force of will, the unspoken threat of some sort of explosion, he kept her bound to him. Emily thought about the morning he had thought she had died of an overdose of laudanum: the desperation that she must not leave. So she stayed, because she was a god-fearing woman and because no matter how hopeless all else was, how useless everything she did seemed, Edmund had finally succeeded in planting the idea of Mathilda’s survival in her mind. If she left now and made his life that bit easier she might wait years to be reunited with her daughter.

The thought of being reunited with Mathilda made Emily cry with shame. What daughter could come back to a household like this? Contradictory desires warred time and time over within her.

Her resentment of Edmund could only grow. He had made so much of his belief that Mathilda lived, set his jaw in martyrdom when she refused to be drawn into such fantasies. And he could have asked her to share that burden at any time by confessing the truth. But he held onto it selfishly until upon sharing it with her it instantly became an impossible case to follow up. Emily grew weary of replaying that conversation they had had in the front room. She had threatened to leave him then; why hadn’t she? She could have taken a train, settled in Edinburgh with her mother and sister.

But then they had always thought she had too much of her father in her. Emily threw letters from her mother in an untidy heap of crumpled paper in the dead fireplace.

One afternoon, the curtains drawn on the living room as she sat in her nightdress and gown going through a box drawn from a collection of correspondence in Edmund’s home office, she came across an early letter she had written to him.

Her hand covered her mouth as she read, her body heaving with sobs. It was 1870; her letter was full of the hope of new acts of parliament passed that summer, plus paragraphs of her opinions on Dickens’ final works. It was suffused with the arrogance of youth, but was gentle and playful and overflowing with love.

She felt betrayed on behalf of her younger self and cast the sheets of paper to the floor. The final decanter was empty and both its neck and her fingers were sticky with the brandy that it had formerly held. She folded her arms about herself and strode to the bottom of the stairs.

Emily paced the house for more time than she realised, muttering to herself as she tried to reach a resolution. Eventually, having slipped a pair of boots on, she burst from the front door into the warm summer air and walked, fists clenched around a handful of coins, she knew not where.

A market vendor obliged her with the purchase of a bottle of absinthe, which bit into her palms less than the coins had. She felt a wild thrill at the thought that not a single person on these familiar streets recognised her. The absinthe was the most refreshing thing she had tasted in weeks — months? And the way her dressing gown billowed as she walked made her feel like the embodiment of a Rossetti painting (although the idea of having hair as red as his muses’ caused her to shudder. It was too much like the flames in her dreams).

By the time the afternoon drew to a close there was no absinthe left and she found that her feet had brought her to a familiar place. The bartender in The Brown Bear must recognise her and trust that the wife of Inspector Reid could be trusted to take drink on credit. He was proving strangely reluctant though, even when she tried to twist her hair up into its usual arrangement to prove her identity.

“In disguise, huh?” a familiar voice asked.

Emily turned on the stool and smiled at Captain Jackson. “Would you believe that this man won’t serve me? I swear I first came here with,” she swallowed a hiccough. “With my husband before this little man was born!”

“It’s ok, I’ve gotcha,” Jackson murmured, perhaps in reference to his swift hand catching her elbow as she slipped on the high bar stool, perhaps in reference to the two fingers he held up whilst mouthing to the bartender.

“Now, Mrs Reid,” he placed one glass of clear spirits in front of her. “What happens to be the matter?”

Emily sniffed. Her eyes were puffy and her nose was red. Her lips were swollen and bruised from where she bit the bottom one and where the top one had knocked against the edge of bottles and decanters. “Well it took me some time to realise it, but Edmund is damned for having killed an albatross. I can see it around his neck whenever I look at him. All about his person is flame.”

Her voice was steady and she raised her glass to her mouth.

Jackson stared dumbly at her for a moment. “Oh. _Oh_. Oh, er. Okay. And, Mrs Reid, have you, um, been…self-medicating for the purpose of these visions?”

She rolled her eyes and took a sip.

Jackson waited.

“This is water!” she hurled the remaining contents of the glass at him.

He blinked the liquid from his eyes, wiped at the rest with his left hand whilst his right tried to maintain a grip on her elbow. “Yes. I think you should have some water,” he told her slowly.

She looked at him with a manic grimace and wrenched her elbow free, banging with both hands on the surface of the bar. “Barman! I demand to be served! Bring me whatever spirit is to hand!”

“Oh, brother,” Jackson groaned. “Mrs Reid, please. When did you last see Edmund? You want that I should go fetch him from his office for you?”

“His boat is lost,” she said icily, turning immediately back to the purpose of hammering on the bar.

Others who sat in the darker recesses and booths now turned to look at the commotion. Jackson decided to get her away from the prying eyes of every man who called Reid their superior officer as quickly as he could.

“Mrs Reid, please, come with me a moment,” he stood behind her, trying to catch hold of her sharp elbows again and coax her down from the stool. She lashed out and he rubbed at the spot on his chest where the blow had landed.

“All right,” he gritted his teeth and grabbed her in a bear hug, pulling her from her chair. “Come on, ain’t no way this isn’t happening. We’re gonna get you in a carriage and get you home.” She was worryingly light, and despite her struggles he carried her easily out into the street. Unfortunately by this point she had remembered how her legs worked, and aimed a savage heel backwards into his knee. “God DAMN it!” he cried, buckling as she wormed her way from his grip. He reached after her but she tumbled forwards in her momentum, reaching for distance and coming to an untidy landing against the pavement outside Leman Street.

Jackson uttered every cuss word he knew to mankind, reaching hopelessly after his friend’s wife as she began to scream into the mud of the gutter. “Aw come on, come on, Reid what the fuck have you done here?” he muttered, bending over her to test tentatively for broken bones. There seemed to be none and she shrugged off his every touch. He looked up at the uniformed men standing outside the station with their jaws agape. “Well?!” Jackson hollered. “Get the inspector!”

Edmund was already on his way, having heard the commotion. He pushed past Artherton, who stood in the doorway, turned and looked him up and down. “What is the meaning of this? All of you get back to work! How many men does it take to–” he broke off when he looked down more closely. Jackson’s steady gaze was reproachful. The woman he knelt over, who now sobbed piteously, beating the mud of the roadside with her fists, did not need to look up.

Edmund licked his lips and swallowed. Blinking rapidly at the sudden prickling of his eyes, he pushed Artherton away from him, back towards the door. “All of you back to work,” he repeated hoarsely. The police around struggled to obey, making their limbs work in a semblance of normal function and purpose. Those passers-by on Leman Street itself were under no such obligation and stayed precisely where they felt they could see events best.

“What happened?” Edmund asked, sinking to his knees next to Jackson and resting his palms gently, protectively on his wife’s shuddering back.

Jackson gave him a disbelieving look. “I was going to ask you the same damned thing.”

Edmund’s face darkened like a summer thunderstorm and Jackson raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “None of my business, okay. Look, she was delusional and walked into The Brown Bear demanding drink on credit. Anyone doing that would turn heads – the inspector’s wife though?”

“Yes, Captain, I _understand_. Why is she in her night clothes? What did she _say_?”

Jackson worked his jaw, repeated the lines about the albatross and the ship. Edmund paled so rapidly Jackson thought he would faint then and there on top of his wife, but then the colour flushed back no slower, a bright, hot, red. “Thank you, Captain,” he said quietly.

“I’ll get a carriage then shall I?” Jackson got his feet, resting a reassuring hand on Edmund’s shoulder.

“Yes, please. To my home address.”

“Naw, Reid, she needs a doctor,” he objected, gesturing towards Emily, who now lay limp and quiet by Edmund’s knees, her eyes glassy and breathing deep. “And not me. She needs a psychiatrist. She needs interviewing and examining and, well...” he shrugged.

“To my home address,” Edmund repeated, no louder than he had previously.

Jackson shrugged again and left to summon a carriage from the rank around the corner. He glanced back once to see Edmund sitting on the edge of the pavement with Emily’s slack form in his lap, stroking her hair with his head bowed over her.

\---

“She was reading Coleridge at about the time the Ripper case was escalating. I can only assume that is the connection,” Edmund shrugged at the little man who stood penitently in his dining room. Emily lay sedated on the chaise in the living room having struggled through some of the doctor’s questions. Edmund had made only a minimal effort to tidy the empty bottles and discarded letters that she had decorated the ground floor with since his last visit.

The doctor nodded nervously as Edmund continued to pace. “Yes, yes, that would fit with this sort of association. Ah, tell me, tell me Inspector, she accuses you, um, ah…”

He stopped pacing and looked at the doctor impatiently. “Well, man?”

“She accuses you of seeing another woman. Is this…is this part of the delusion?” the doctor asked warily.

Oddly, this felt like a final blow. Edmund’s shoulders dropped and his face crumpled as though he had received a strike to the stomach. He looked down. “No. That is true. I did not think she knew.”

The doctor nodded vigorously once more, rubbing his hands together and bowing his small white head. “Good, good, er, that is to say, the delusion is not deeper than it might have been. But she is thoroughly hysterical, I am afraid. She must come in for proper care and treatment.”

Edmund nodded too, unable to look up from where his gaze had rooted itself to the carpet near his feet.

Eventually, with paperwork signed and money exchanged, the doctor left with Emily, who was too heavily drugged to notice or care.

Walking around the silent house stiffly, Edmund retrieved bottles and decanters and disposed of them. He unfurled crumpled letters from the fireplace and brushed soot from them. Finally he picked up the sheets of the letter she had written to him in 1870 when they eagerly anticipated their coming marriage. He saw that her tears had fallen over it recently and let his join hers on the page before he replaced it in its box in his office.

Finally, when things were a little more in order, he picked up his hat from its hook by the door and stepped outside. He walked with heavy steps towards the Jewish quarter.

When he knocked at the orphanage it was Isaac Bloom who opened the door. Edmund rolled his eyes, ready to beg for entrance, just to be able to talk to Deborah once more, but Bloom stepped aside. “She told me I could go, but I’ll wait out here,” he said simply. “I’ll be here when you leave.”

Edmund nodded shiftily and brushed past the other man, removing his hat and holding it before him as though it were some sort of way of testing the waters.

He braced himself as he entered the kitchen, expecting the rage she had once rained down on him for failing to find justice for her cousin Joshua. But Deborah just stood on the other side of the table, her hands in the pockets of her dress. Her eyes looked red, her face was written with sadness, but there was no anger.

Eventually she shrugged. “How on earth could you not see what happened to her? I met her once a week maybe, for tea, and then only until she left the shelter. I could not see this. I could not!” she sounded defensive, as though Isaac had had to convince her of this last fact. “But how could you, her husband, miss such a descent into horrors?”

He looked down, speechless.

“My word,” Deborah breathed. “I have participated in this…this wilful destruction. This that drove an innocent, kind-hearted woman into a corner of despair from which she had no escape.”

He wished she would be angry, but there was just repulsion in her voice. Her soft, full lips curved into a cynical grimace and her eyes, lined with kindness, now stared into blank space as she shook her head.

He gulped, his throat suddenly hard. “I had no right to involve you in this,” he tried, the words sounding strangled.

“No, thank you, I shall keep my part of the guilt here,” she returned sharply. “I knew that you were a married man, and I knew what I was doing. What do you want to say, Edmund?”

In the dark room, where one candle stood on the table between them, there seemed less shame in letting some tears overflow his brimming eyes; after all, it was in her presence that he had always felt most able to be honest with such awkward emotions. “I suppose…other than that I am sorry, and that I am still, despite everything, grateful to you…” he drew a shuddering breath and glanced up. Deborah had folded her arms in front of her, but her face now looked alarmed. “I wish things could be, could have been different. I remain in awe of you, and I wish circumstances could be other than they are.”

She turned her head to the side. “Get out,” she whispered. He saw her cheek glint in the candlelight. “You come here the night your wife is admitted to therapeutic care, to tell me you wish things had been different, so that—what? Whatever this — _we_ — were might carry on as before?”

“It is not what I meant,” he protested, the words coming heavy with unbottled emotion. She was unreachable, leaning against the sink. If he tried to move towards her, around the table, she would flee into another corner of the room.

Deborah shook her head more vehemently, but kept it turned from him, her arms still folded. Reluctantly, lost for any further words that might convince her of the genuine sentiment he felt for her, Edmund turned from the kitchen and walked back to the front door.

Once outside, he listened to the bolts and locks click shut behind him. Isaac watched him with an inscrutable expression. He offered Edmund a cigarette, which was refused. “Have you read the work of Nietzsche, Inspector Reid?” he asked, falling into step beside Edmund as they wandered into the smoggy night.

\---

He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man,

He rose the morrow morn.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Thomas Coleridge, which is also quoted in Emily's dream. Other quotes from Tennyson's Idylls of the King (Lancelot and Edith and The Coming of Arthur). I'm sorry if this peters out a bit towards the end (I'd have made the timeline stretch a bit longer given the time in my own life to write it!), but I wrote it in less than a week and really need to get back to real work now. But I NEEDED TO KNOW how the Emily Reid of season 1 ended up in the state she's described in 2.02. Man wtf writers, normally when they skip a bit of time it's good for the momentum of the show but that was just not caring a jot about two awesome female characters. So it made me write fic. Sorry.  
> I'd love to return to it if there's interest, and certainly have high hopes for [SPOILERS] the return of Deborah in season 4 [/spoilers].


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